An album that perhaps skips too easily from one style to another for its own good, though there are other sublime moments.

The Menahan Street Band have proven a fertile sampling source for such as Jay-Z, Kid Cudi and 50 Cent, and it's not hard to tell why listening to the grooves on this latest album.

It's presented as 39 miniature sonic studies in the vein of European "library music" fragments, interspersed with dialogue clips from the movie and sound effects to evoke the protagonist's deteriorating mindset.

Stockport quartet 10cc were, in this regard, the British equivalent of Steely Dan, applying advanced musical and lyrical skills initially to the humble task of sardonic pop pastiches like "Donna" and, as they developed, to the socio-political satires ("The Wall Street Shuffle", "Clockwork Creep") that made up their second album, Sheet Music.

The erosion of control is palpable as the show progresses, though it's hard to tell whether it's due to damage or just boredom.

Elsewhere, these grand new performances with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra serve to pinion some songs too fixedly.

The result is an engaging, softly sensuous air of desolation, emotion recollected in tranquility.

The big Brill concept doesn't work, Cahn, Cooke and Ellington not being song-factory writers.

Wu Block suffers from the absence of a few vital presences, in particular Wu Tang producer the RZA.

This third album sounds exhausted, worn out rather than careworn.

Bruno Mars is a talented chap, he's forced to demean his abilities by echoing other artists' former glories on Unorthodox Jukebox, whose title all but gives the game away.

His songs may reference antiquities like Ernest Hemingway, but the drum programmes, autotuned vocals and synth sequences are more modern than the usual country-rock favoured by septuagenarian troubadours.

His quest to bring sexy back to Britain founders amid gauche come-ons ("Your aura/ It's so shiny") and strained emoting.

Too much of the album is drably formulaic, a series of gambits shuffled into passable shapes rather than memorable songs.

When she sticks to the disco-pop staples of celebrating youth and dancing and fun, in tracks like "Young", "Live It Up" and "Live Your Life", once the energy dissipates, so do the songs, evaporating as if they never existed.

The Zolas are a Canadian indie band whose outsider-pop songs evoke a keen sense of disjunction with the modern world.

An extra eight-track CD of new material, which is our primary concern here. [It does not] adds much to the Minaj experience.

The results evoke the fellowship of the emotionally bruised in a variety of ways.

They've certainly lost much of their vocal character to the dreaded auto-tune, without gaining much by recompense.

While Take The Crown undoubtedly contains many individual tracks sure to tickle the mainstream pop palate, that doesn't in itself make for a great album.

["When It's All Over"] itself is one of the worst here, mercifully outnumbered by the merely adequate and the few standout songs.

Though less ambitious than 2009's The Liberty of Norton Folgate, Madness's Oui Oui Si Si Ja Ja Da Da confirms the benefits of spreading songwriting chores among the entire band.

The poorest served is hapless Ellie Goulding, struggling against the hurtling momentum of "I Need Your Love"; more successful is Florence Welch on "Sweet Nothing".

In some cases, that sugary voice which works so well as a pop vehicle lacks the full-bodied character to carry a big ballad.

Hands of Glory is a smaller, more intimate work than Andrew Bird's recent albums.

Former Lives shares similarities with Gibbard's Postal Service work; elsewhere his scattershot stylistic approach weakens songs.

Save for the opening "The Once and Future Carpenter", about a woodworker who abandons his trade to wander, this second album is pretty dismal fare.

It's all sounding terribly tired now.

Actor Maxine Peake delivers the combination of historical narrative and polemic in her blackest-pudding accent, over a gamelan tinkle of synth tones and string synths that evoke the blend of grit and gentrification now surrounding these events.

It's maritime in mood.

Sometimes the recurrent mood of ecstatic affirmation of life that's evident in her singing can be short-changed by arrangements that fuss to no great purpose, dissipating their impact in brittle beats and pointless detail.

Martha Wainwright's latest songs characteristically zigzag about the emotional spectrum.

Jeff Lynne's musical memoir of youthful influences, old songs are recast in new lights.

It's a well-crafted, stylish piece of work. But it's hard to love songs that try to hide.

In some cases, as in "Cloud on My Tongue", the orchestrations serve as little more than swaddling blankets. But the more thoughtful rearrangements can be transformative.

No Doubt makes only the most tentative divergences from previously tried and tested strategies, which gives Push and Shove a character that could be described as either dated or timeless.

Babel bowls along with the ebullient energy one expects of Mumford & Sons, like a cider-soused hoedown at an after-hours lock-in. But while this works to the advantage of their more rousing sentiments, it tends to iron out the subtler creases in some of the songs.

The music Kanye West reserves for his own albums is so much more ambitious than that apportioned to the collaborations on this compilation from his new label, Good Music. Which isn't to say it's not effective.

It's a perfunctory affair, further fragmented on my download version by the muting of Wayne's stream of expletives, which renders large parts of it unintelligible.

Not bad, and nice for Nick. But for every good 'un, there's a dull 'un too.

Elysium is bookended by two of the best songs the Pet Shop Boys have written in years, but flags badly in between.

Deceptively uneasy listening at times, but worth the effort.

Thanks to her faithful for enabling the rest of us to enjoy Correa's gauzy, melodic dream-pop.

[Lead singer] Justin Young assert[s] that he's "too self-absorbed" to be the voice of a generation. This wouldn't be so bad if the music didn't follow suit, with lumpen punk-rock grinds and spartan guitar-rock trudges.

While there's some interesting moments to be found here, for the most part Centipede Hz is a fatiguing experience.

This alliance with The Orb is positive for both parties, Perry providing a tighter rein on their tendency to meander, while they furnish him with a different terrain to his usual dub skanks.

On [Cat Power] Marshall has changed direction yet again, abandoning her soul charm for something much less appealing.... But her natural grace shines through on "3, 6, 9"... and "Ruin."

The results are simply irritating, in so many ways.

Bloc Party's touchstones remain firmly rooted in their indie upbringing.

The result is a sort of mannered, formalist rusticity that only occasionally develops a convincing momentum.

A frustrating experience overall.

The resulting extended instrumental palette has brought a new depth to the arrangements but has added little transparency to Yorkston's often bewildering lyrics.

Overall: must try harder. Or appear to.

Like Comedy features their ebullient charm in large dollops.

Along with the anger and regret comes the usual hip-hop baggage of aggrandisement, recrimination and old-school reminiscence.

However bleak, there's no denying the delicate mood created by [Kozelek's] charm.

Andre Williams is a renegade R'n B spirit who remains, in his seventies, as scurrilous as ever.

"Whistle", takes a sidestep with its acoustic guitar and tedious single-entendre hook, but there are plenty more brutal stompers to spare on Wild Ones.

Throughout Synthetica, an undertow of dystopian unease drags the music away from standard pop territory into darker areas.

The duo have devised a series of fascinating improvisations.

The fascination with sonic texture over tune tends to make everything sound like everything else, as if the tracks were leaking into one another.

Maroon 5's sudden decline with the Mutt Lange-produced Hands All Over seems unlikely to be significantly overturned by the lacklustre Overexposed.

The blandness of the R&B pop-soul arrangements simply throws attention on to the repetitive narrowness of Bieber's delivery.

Sometimes, bigger is not better: Giant Sand's Howe Gelb has often been most potent with minimal resources, which may explain why I'm slightly underwhelmed by this major project.

He fills the Gary Moore-shaped hole in the world admirably.

After a while, the sticky, repetitive swirls work their hypnotic magic: they're like The Bomb Squad mired in depression rather than revolution.

There's a drive and urgency about Maximo Park's The National Health that perfectly matches frontman Paul Smith's dominant lyrical theme, of taking arms against a sea of troubles in order to forge a better life for yourself.

Though drab and overlong, it has a certain rugged, whiskery charm, which doesn't extend to the concluding "God Save the Queen", a stodge too far.

[TWGMTR] is pitifully thin stuff, with far too many nostalgic hankerings.

[More of their] unchanging plastic punk aesthetic.

The homogeneity of the album's arrangements effectively denudes the individual songs of their emotional power.

A comeback shouldn't sound this much like treading water.

Here, the abrupt shifts between ballad placidity and animated angst underscore the theme of changing course.

The eight tracks of Valtari, which, while pleasant, are somewhat underwhelming examples of the band's formula.

There's no surprises here.

It might have been hoped that the album itself were more impressive.

It's all very laidback and earnest, but the endless lo-cal homilies ultimately grate.

Pleasantly undemanding for a few tracks, the album just seems to evaporate away halfway through, as if even its creators couldn't retain interest in it, either.

The melancholy mood pervades throughout, into the itchy, insect flurries of Penderecki's Polymorphia, for 48 strings, and Greenwood's 48 Responses To Polymorphia.

This 1991 album is the best of three reissues of their work – also available are their debut, Isn't Anything, and a 2CD compilation of outtakes and EPs.

As usual, guests crowd the album... less welcome, though, is the way that vast tranches of the album serve as a showcase for Willie's son, Lukas.

With Urban Turbanm, Tjinder Singh reinforces his position as one of the UK's more engaging musical minds.

There are successes here... but the overall effect can be gruelling.

Melancholy of tone, it occasionally attains the antique industry of Michael Nyman's early Peter Greenaway scores, but the overall effect is more akin to the musical equivalent of a mock-tudorbethan semi.

Strangeland marks a sad reversion to Coldplay territory after Keane's tentative experimentation on recent releases.

Over brutish electro-stomps and fizzy pop trifles every bit as sickly as that suggests, Marina's shrill Violet Elizabeth Bott inflections proclaim her emptiness.

[The album] mostly eschews his usual glum ruminations in favour of pleasingly methodical instrumental trifles.

Jim Moray's filtering of traditional folk music through a mesh of modern sensibilities continues on Skulk.

Listen, Whitey! seethes with righteous anger and revolutionary determination.

Paolo Nutini brings the apt timbre and weary dignity to "Hard Times (Come Again No More)", while The Decemberists' Colin Meloy has the sturdy asperity of a righteous ranter on a version of Dylan's "When The Ship Comes In".

Rufus Wainwright believes this to be "the most pop album" he's ever made, and he's probably right, so long as you're thinking 1970s pop.

Ultimately, however, despite the fizzing electronic undercarriage applied to most tracks on Electronic Earth, Labrinth's real forte may turn out to be the more traditional, earthbound musical skills.

Best of all is "The Day That We Die", Rufus Wainwright oozing mournfully with his dad about the way that familial potholes prove so difficult to repair.

An impressive show, but not one likely to persuade doubters.

Halfway through, as guest rappers stop littering the proceedings, the album does a 90-degree shift and becomes a banging club affair, stuffed with David Guetta-style synth-stompers.

Felice fails to animate them in the manner of comparable storytellers like Johnny Dowd and Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin, and thus leaves one's interest unignited.

It's not the greatest story ever told--the depth of insight runs to little more than "Friends--how many have them? How long before they split like atoms?"--but the overall warmth is engaging.